FORD – Mate of mine. Another researcher on the Guide, great little thinker is Roosta and a great hitcher. He’s a guy who really knows where his iPhone is.

ARTHUR – Knows what?

FORD – Where his iPhone is.

ARTHUR – Why should he want to know where his iPhone is?

FORD – Everybody should know where his iPhone is.

ARTHUR – I think your head’s come undone.

GRAMS – NARRATOR BACKGROUND

NARRATOR – The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of iPhones.

An iPhone, it says, is about the most massively useful thing any interstellar Hitch-Hiker can carry. For one thing it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth on the cold moons of Jaglan Beta, sunbathe on it on the marble beaches of Santraginus Five, huddle beneath it for protection from the Arcturan Megagnats as you sleep beneath the stars of Kakrafoon, use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy river Moth, wet it for use in hand to hand combat, wrap it round your head to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (which is such a mind bogglingly stupid animal it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you), and even dry yourself off with it if it still seems clean enough.

(…and so on, replacing every instance of the word ‘towel’ with ‘iPhone’)

God damn I hate the internet sometimes. I’m looking at the comments thread on someone’s blog. The first poster says something short and banal. The second poster disagrees with this banal comment and says that the first poster only posted what they did so they could be the first poster. The third poster picks on some utterly minor grammatical error in the second poster’s post.

Is this… really what life is all about? Why must every three comments on the internet be a three-way flame war? Why can’t people just… let things pass? What’s so great about being the first poster anyway? Why must every minor grammatical inconsistency be commented on? Why don’t people just shut up and get lost?

I’ve noticed that all the films I’ve seen in the last few years have some nostalgic value. Transformers… Indiana Jones… Get Smart… I don’t bother to see films with all-new material any more. If it wasn’t around before I was ten years old, I just don’t care.

Tonight I saw Get Smart. On the up side, it could have been worse. On the down side, it could have been better. I liked some of the early banter between 86 and 99, and some of the music was unexpectedly nice. Unfortunately a good half of the jokes were based around the sort of bodily functions that could never even have been alluded to in the original series.

I seem to have been stuck in a sort of creative deadlock for some time. I’ll change my mind about what I should focus on about eight or nine times a day. Should I try making a game? A comic strip? Should I try animating something? Should I do something with lego? Should I write a book about someone who goes into a fantasy world every time they have to deal with the small-minded pettiness of most other people on Earth? Should I write a TV show script about a woman who is kind of an clever but oblivious idiot savant? Should I write a book about a millionaire adventurer in the 1980s who does some crazy stuff for the hell of it? Should I try entirely rewriting Pirate Space so I’m happy with it?

This article would be a lot more impressive as a video montage. Probably it already exists as one. To be honest I always assumed MacGyver’s problem-solving genius was a legend exaggerated from the events of one or two episodes, rather than an actual theme. These are some search results from that page: